Political scientist and media critic

December 11, 2012

New at CJR: Addressing the asymmetry question

My new CJR column considers the argument that the pressure for partisan balance in factchecking made 2012 campaign coverage worse. Here's how it begins:

Factchecking made great strides during the 2012 campaign, but were those advances compromised by the pressure to maintain partisan balance?

Two respected Washington think tank scholars say yes. Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution and Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute, who have recently argued that Republican extremism is to blame for many of the pathologies of Washington, told The Huffington Post’s Dan Froomkin last week that journalistic factchecking of the 2012 campaign may have been counterproductive...

Comments

I appreciate your attempts at balance Brendan, going back to your Spinasity days, but in my view, much of the "fact checking" done in this election cycle was basically just opinion writing not checking of actual facts. Over and over again some fact checker would find that although everything (or nearly everything) a candidate said was a true verifiable fact, they would assign some sort of "false" rating because they disagreed that the facts supported whatever conclusion the candidate came to.

That is opining on facts, not checking them.

This tendency to use the "fact-checking" position to argue sides on the part of some prominent media outlets basically made *all* fact-checking suspect in my mind and makes you wonder "who is checking the fact-checkers". No-one has time to follow that down the rabbit-hole so my approach was to ignore them all and if I really wanted to know the facts to dig on my own.